revere
Posts by this author
January 12, 2008
Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff often seems mystified that the public doesn't want to be protected as much as he wants to protect them. Maybe a look at the record of the protectors will provide some clue. Protectors like the Transporation Security Administration (TSA), the lovable airport…
January 11, 2008
The Consumer Product Safety Commission is supposed to make sure toys and other consumer products are safe. They recalled 472 products last year. That's a pretty good record for a Lilliputian agency that has a staff of only 400. This is George Bush's dream -- shrinking the size of the government.…
January 11, 2008
An AP report in The Daily Star (Egypt) says the head of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) is complaining that fears of a flu pandemic caused by H5N1 are overblown. He's talking to the press so presumably he understands that he has to be careful how he says things. So we also have to…
January 10, 2008
There is a determined honey lobby out there touting the health benefits of honey. That's fine with me, as I am not an enemy of honey. On the other hand, honey, while "natural," is not a completely harmless foodstuff, especially for infants. You wouldn't know it reading the spate of news articles on…
January 10, 2008
Whenever confirmed human cases of bird flu appear in an area there usually follows heightened sensitivity to new cases of severe pneumonia. Are they bird flu too? Severe pneumonia is pretty common, so you can't automatically assume that "if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck it must be a…
January 9, 2008
Last Saturday night Mrs. R. and I voluntarily subjected ourselves to four hours of political debates, two involving aspirants for the presidential nomination of the Republican party and two hours for the Democrats. Bad karma? Anyway, for the record, the Democrats won both debates, their own and the…
January 9, 2008
Every year "flu season" comes during which there is a marked uptick in influenza-like illnesses (ILIs) in the community. An ILI is defined to be cough or sore throat together with a fever of over 100 degrees F. (37.8 degrees C.) or self-reported fever and chills as well as no other obvious cause (e…
January 8, 2008
Faith-based environmental protection. Why not? The Bush administration isn't using the law or regulations:
Ignoring all legal and technical evidence -- and the advice of his career experts -- [EPA Administrator Steven] Johnson sided with the car industry and rejected the request of California to…
January 8, 2008
A new study from a glycobiology laboratory at MIT is creating a buzz in the flu community (see the MIT Press Release here). A great deal of molecular biology and virology studies what happens when the virus gets into a cell to use the cell's own machinery to make copies of itself. Glycobiology is…
January 7, 2008
Lots of countries have or will mandate the use of low-energy light bulbs. That's it, for the incandescent bulb. Soon it will be just compact fluorescents or LEDs or whatever comes next. Along with this comes the inevitable news articles that start, "Health experts are warning that . . . ":
The…
January 7, 2008
Hospitals are dangerous places, but sometimes you have to be there. If you are a child in the developing world sick with pneumonia, the World Health Organization (WHO) thinks that's one of the times. Pneumonia is the big killer of children globally, so WHO guidelines call for children with severe…
January 6, 2008
The big newswires and health agencies are relatively quiet, but word keeps leaking out of Egypt that there are a lot of suspect bird flu cases:
CAIRO: Hospitals nationwide reportedly quarantined more human cases suspected of being infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus.
According to Al-Masry Al-Youm…
January 6, 2008
Jonathan Luxmoore of the Catholic News Service doesn't respect me, I guess. He thinks I'm a hypocrite because I said I liked Christmas although I'm an atheist. Well, Ex-CUSE . ME:
Sir,
I may not be alone in detecting a case of having your Christmas cake and eating it in David Aaronovitch's defence…
January 5, 2008
If you are reading this you didn't die in 2005. But 2,447,903 Americans did die (if you aren't an American the good news is you aren't at risk of being included in the American death numbers). These are preliminary numbers, just released by CDC and the seven significant figures is a bit of -- what…
January 4, 2008
Note to Senator Larry Craig. Now you can have "intimate contact with an anonymous stranger [in a public toilet] without the associated awkwardness of verbal discourse". No toe tapping required. Just look for the yellow color in the new thermochromic toilet seat (h/t Boingboing).
This beauty glows…
January 4, 2008
With the turn of the calendar there is always both hope and anxiety about the year ahead. This is nice because it gives pundits and bloggers something to write about. Just before Christmas The Times of London published\ a "leading article" (unsigned), Black Swans and Bird Flu, which was about the…
January 3, 2008
Too little discussed -- gender differences in upper respiratory infections:
glumbert - The Man Cold
January 3, 2008
Bora Zivkovic (aka Coturnix) is the Scienceblogs.com maestro at Blog Around the Clock. He is also a bona fide circadian rhythm researcher, which explains how he is able to blog so prolifically, orchestrate the community participation of PLoS One and still have time left over to compile the only…
January 3, 2008
The back and forth about WHO over the weekend generated plenty of comment. I am still of the mind that WHO is an important part of the pandemic flu picture and we should try to help it do better. After defending them on Friday of last week I turned around and slammed them for poor risk…
January 2, 2008
The 60s radical group, the Weathermen, took their name from a Bob Dylan song, Subterranean Homesick Blues: s' "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Now we have the converse. You don't need to break wind to know this weatherman blows. On his blog, Chris Allen, the TV…
January 2, 2008
Egypt continues to be the country outside of Asia with the highest case total of H5N1 disease. Last year there were 23 cases, 18 the year before. A year ago there were 3 confirmed cases each in December and January, with the big month being later, March (7 cases). Flu season (including bird flu) is…
January 1, 2008
I guess there are a lot of things in the newspapers that leave you shaking your head, but a recent Op Ed by surgeon Atul Gawande left both Mrs. R. and me shaking our heads simultaneously, accompanied by jaws headed south and and eyes bulging. Quite a visual, I admit. But consider the source. I'll…
January 1, 2008
Yesterday I indulged myself and took a personal look backward. It was New Year's Eve, after all, the end of a year. Today is New Year's Day, the day we look to the year ahead. Is this the Year of The Big One (pandemically speaking)? Or another year of Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop? If we can't…
December 31, 2007
Year's end. We don't disclose how many Reveres there are or where they are (we don't even correct the rife speculation and usually incorrect assumptions in the Comments), but one thing we/I will reveal: there's only one Revere at a time. So it falls to this one to look back on the past year, which…
December 31, 2007
What the hell. It's the end of the year. Always fun to look back at those events which alter and illuminate Our Times. And You Were There:
December 31, 2007
Everyone seems to have an opinion about whether bird flu will be the next terrible global pandemic. In current parlance "bird flu" means human infection with the highly pathogenic avian influenza/A subtype H5N1. There is no doubt that this is the 800 pound gorilla in the global health room at the…
December 30, 2007
After spending more time than I wished "defending" WHO against what I considered a particular kind of scurrilous attack (it also seemed to raise the hackles of some unintended as targets, but the dialog with them was at least rational) -- after all that, I now have to turn around and complain about…
December 30, 2007
One of my guilty pleasures used to be indulging in End-of-the-Year wrap-ups on network news. I'm not exactly sure why and it's been decades since I've enjoyed what has become a sterile exercise in hindsight spin doctoring. There are still specialized areas, though, where the judgments of the…
December 29, 2007
This both made me laugh and made me mad. Corey Doctorow over at Boingboing relates how he was contacted by a new online service to write a letter of recommendation for a former student applying to graduate school. Using a web-based interface the same letter could be submitted to multiple…
December 28, 2007
I learned emergency cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in medical school more than forty years ago and it hasn't changed much until now. It was always hard to do, but now it's half as hard and not as unaesthetic, at least if the results of several studies are taken into account.
The problem was…